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Army Secretary Is Ousted in Furor Over Hospital Care

WASHINGTON, March 2 — Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey was forced to resign Friday over the handling of revelations that wounded soldiers were receiving shabby and slow treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Even as the grim-faced defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, announced Mr. Harvey’s dismissal, the Army put a new general in charge of the hospital, the second change of command in two days, and a clear signal that Mr. Gates wanted a clean break from the status quo.

Earlier, the White House had announced that President Bush would appoint a bipartisan panel to examine the medical treatment provided to wounded service members, both by the Defense Department and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation,” Mr. Gates told reporters. “Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems.”

A senior Pentagon official said Mr. Gates had demanded Mr. Harvey’s resignation because he was displeased that Mr. Harvey on Thursday, in dismissing the commander of Walter Reed, temporarily named Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley to take command. General Kiley, the Army’s top medical officer, had earlier appeared to play down the problems at Walter Reed, where he was in command until 2004.

Mr. Gates’s aggressiveness in addressing the problem has surprised many Pentagon officials who are still getting used to his style more than two months into his service.

Ordered by Mr. Gates to get an acceptable new commander in place by the end of the day, the Army announced late Friday that Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, a veteran Army doctor and the brother of the current Army chief of staff, would take over command at Walter Reed.

In his weekly radio address, taped on Friday for broadcast on Saturday morning, Mr. Bush said, “This is unacceptable to me, it is unacceptable to our country, and it’s not going to continue.” The White House released a transcript without the usual embargo on its publication.

White House officials said the review ordered by Mr. Bush would examine soldiers’ medical treatment starting when they were wounded, as they were moved to Defense Department hospitals and as they received care in V.A. facilities after leaving the armed services.

Photo

Francis J. Harvey, secretary of the Army, during a Pentagon briefing in January 2006.Credit
Win McNamee/Getty Images

The White House commission seemed to overlap in at least some respects with a separate panel announced by Mr. Gates last week that he said had authority to examine living conditions, problems getting prompt care and any other issues at Walter Reed and other military-run hospitals the panel chose to examine.

Officials said the White House commission was likely to undertake a broader review and take longer with its investigation than the Pentagon panel, which has a 45-day deadline. Mr. Bush plans to name his commission’s members next week.

House and Senate committees, too, are planning hearings on the matter next week. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said Friday that it was issuing a subpoena to Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, who had been in command of the hospital since last August before his firing on Thursday. The panel has scheduled a hearing at Walter Reed on Monday.

The committee also made public an internal hospital memorandum written last September that warned that an Army decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed was causing an exodus of experienced career personnel and putting patient care “at risk of mission failure.”

The scandal at Walter Reed is particularly embarrassing to the administration because many top officials have visited injured troops there. Although Mr. Bush has visited Walter Reed several times, his spokesman, Tony Snow, said last month that the president had learned about the situation from the newspaper and that he had given orders to “find out what the problem is and fix it.”

Army officials have defended the treatment provided to most patients at Walter Reed, especially the most serious cases, those admitted to inpatient wards on its campus a few miles from the center of Washington.

But the administration has been unable to explain why adequate improvements at Walter Reed’s nearby satellite facilities used to house outpatients were not made before the shoddy conditions were disclosed last month in a series of articles in The Washington Post. And the furor is unlikely to abate soon.

Mr. Harvey, the senior civilian official overseeing the Army, joined the Pentagon in 2004 after a long career as an engineer working mainly for defense contractors. He was an executive with the Westinghouse Corporation from 1969 to 1997.

In a speech last year, he said improved efficiency could reduce both the federal work force and the number of contractors.

But the House committee leaders said that at Walter Reed, hiring a contractor had resulted in a steep decline in the number of support personnel like maintenance workers to fewer than 60 last month, from 300 in early 2006.

An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said that “didn’t help” efforts over the last year to improve conditions for patients in Building 18, the dilapidated 50-room former hotel across the street from Walter Reed where outpatients are housed. Before rushed renovations last month, the building had moldy walls, stained carpets and infestations of rats.

Walter Reed officials have also acknowledged that the large number of wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan, currently around 650 patients and outpatients, has taxed doctors, nurses and other care providers and forced them to rely more heavily on overflow facilities.

General Kiley, commander of Walter Reed from 2002 to 2004, left when he was appointed Army surgeon general. On a tour of the outpatient facilities for reporters last month, he took issue with the way the conditions were portrayed in some accounts.

“While we have some issues here, this is not a horrific, catastrophic failure at Walter Reed,” he said. “I mean these are not good, but you saw rooms that look perfectly acceptable, you saw the day rooms with the pool tables and plasma screen TVs, and we’re working every day to make those rooms better.”

But those comments and others did not please Mr. Gates, aides said. Even though he issued a statement Thursday endorsing the decision to remove General Weightman, he was not aware that the Army had chosen General Kiley to be the acting commander, an appointment that lasted just one day.

“It could have been almost anybody but Kiley,” said a senior Pentagon official, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss Mr. Gates’s thinking. Referring to General Kiley’s service as the hospital commander, he added: “Some of this may well have developed and even started on his watch. And his comments also demonstrated a certain insensitivity.”

General Schoomaker, 58, the new commander, had been commander of the Army’s Medical Research and Material Command at Fort Detrick, Md. His brother, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, who is stepping down next month, was not involved in the decision to select him, the senior Pentagon official said.

In a visit to the outpatient facility last month before it was fixed up, Mr. Harvey called the conditions inexcusable. But he went on to place the blame for the situation on noncommissioned officers.

“We had some N.C.O.’s who weren’t doing their job, period,” Mr. Harvey said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: ARMY SECRETARY OUSTED IN FUROR ON HOSPITAL CARE. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe